


Far and Tethered

by Typey



Category: Warehouse 13
Genre: Angst, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-26
Updated: 2013-04-26
Packaged: 2017-12-26 11:48:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 649
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/965585
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Typey/pseuds/Typey
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Helena is far away from the Warehouse and Myka and feels the pull every second.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Far and Tethered

_Far and tethered._

No, not quite. Helena struggled for the phrase.

_Tarred and feathered._

She looked down at her nearly empty glass — the sweetness of the American whiskey providing an ironic counterpoint to the bitterness that had settled deep within her over many weeks of isolation — and tried the thought again.

_I deserve to be tarred and feathered._

Dramatic, perhaps, to call upon a barbaric, brutish means of humiliating community justice. But fitting, as well, since her most recent wrongdoing was to slink away from those people who made up the only community that mattered to her anymore.

She had left behind the Warehouse and a new family, one she had broken into and then helped piece back together, without saying goodbye. She had left Myka without a word before departing and without any since. Myka, whose permission of more intimacies had made Helena optimistic for the first time in so long — the slight touches were welcome, as were the overt gazes and flirtatious asides. Flirtatious asides Helena would be completely incapable of offering at this moment, judging by the shallow depth of amber liquid left in her third glass and her inability to recall a common idiom.

Not that her current location would have been an appropriate venue for any of the things Helena wanted to say to Myka. A small-town bar with a sticky floor and leery patrons would not be the place to make sly double entendres or to confess things to Myka that Helena had not been willing to say out loud even in the comforting confines of their shared home. And it certainly would never be the place offer whispered and impassioned promises for the future.

She wished she could…

No. Drunk or sober, Helena would not give in to the wish to go back in time.

She would, however, admit the desire to travel the miles separating her from Myka. The first few weeks of her exile she refused to let herself map out paths back to South Dakota — different combinations of coaches, cars, trains, even planes — because, despite any obligation to obey her current orders, she would have covered that distance in a heartbeat to see Myka again. To tell her that she hadn’t wanted to walk away, never wanted to be apart. Tell her that there would never be a way to say goodbye to the one person who knows you better than anyone else. That she so regretted leaving and was ashamed at her manner of departure.

Those early weeks had passed, and with them the self-delusion that Helena’s continued solitude was a sign of strength and worth; that _following the rules_ this time was the better part of valor. Helena knew that every minute she stayed away from Myka she proved herself weaker and less worthy than Myka deserved.

And here she sat, desperate to be found out as an ignoble fraud, to endure even a parade covered in pitch and feathers, marking her a scoundrel, if only it meant that Myka would come storming through that door to drag her back to the Warehouse. If it meant an end to this pattern of drunken self-flagellation. If the destination was home and a chance to atone.

Finding a way out of grief and despair and confusion once, Helena had used Myka’s strength to tie her to reality; facing her own destruction, unable to have even one touch from the woman she loved, Helena had relied on Myka’s courage. Myka had been her connection to this time and this place. Over and over again, when Helena thought she had reached the limits of her ability to stay firmly fixed to her modern surroundings, she clung to the knowledge that Myka was her tether. Would always be.

She may have deserved to be tarred and feathered for abandoning Myka, but perhaps her bourbon-addled mind hadn’t been wrong with _far and tethered_.


End file.
